Arc d'X

48

WHEN HE LEFT the city, the beggars followed.

He had returned in broad daylight years before, met by neither cops nor priests, who were only beginning to adjust to the trauma of his escape and therefore hardly expected his reappearance. In the voggy glare of midafternoon, under the eyes of the city, he moved himself and the red books to the volcano, and only the beggars took note, the beggars who had zeroed in on his unguarded conscience from every alley and corner, in the midst of every crowd. Now they poured into the streets from the curbs and doorways, following along behind not to beg anything more of him but simply to say goodbye, the broken army of the city’s forsaken standing at the edge of town alongside the peripheral highway silently watching him disappear into the lava fields. It was only this demonstration that alerted the authorities of Aeonopolis, half a day late, that Etcher had again slipped in and out of their grasp. As the Arboretum had long since proved, authority was never particularly equipped for dealing with audacity.

Larger audacities were to confront them.

Page by page, Etcher was rewriting the books.

Page by page he left the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History in the red mailbox at the volcano’s base, as had been arranged with the Church; what had not been arranged was that, leaf by leaf, each was transformed by him. As the years passed, the precarious placement of the volumes on the shores of the crater’s fire, where Etcher might drop them one by one into the lava, unraveled the nerves of the priests while discouraging the plans of police to swoop down on the tiny house and seize what was in it. Etcher had taken the lessons of stalemate to the ultimate edge of stalemate, and then began to write. He wrote every day that he didn’t throw himself into the crater with as many of the books as his arms could carry.

He did it because, having not had a single night since her death when he didn’t dream of her, having plummeted into the dark hole of his heart, all he could find in his control was history. As his heart had been undone, as he would undo his own memory in some pointless effort to forget her, he would now undo history minute by minute, detail by detail. He gave history its false cues, he misspoke its passwords. In his rewritten history bombs failed to detonate, assassins’ guns misfired in the theater. Secret tunnels were dug from the killing grounds of the Commune by which escaped whole revolutions; invasions were distracted by the pornographic obsessions of dictators. Motorcades were delayed by a flat tire. The earth of Etcher’s new history shimmered with the fission of reactor meltdowns, and wars that had once ended in four years went on for forty. Hard moral lessons were corrupted. The conscience of history became as relative as its science, and memory became a factor of expedience in the equation of power.

Complicit in Etcher’s assault were the priests themselves, who gave no indication they understood the revisions. Perhaps they actually believed it didn’t matter, as long as the books were returned to their vault where they might again become sacred. Likelier they suppressed their worst suspicions, flinging the returned pages back into the dark and lunging the door closed behind them to secure the books not from thieves but themselves, who might come to know what they couldn’t stand to know. Likeliest was that the priests had rarely read the history in the first place and wouldn’t have known it was not the same even if they bothered to read it now. Rummaging in the heart’s basement, stepping into history through the doorway of the heart as the second hand hurtled toward midnight, perhaps not unlike the priests Etcher believed he would find a resurrection. Not his own, since he didn’t believe in that anymore, but hers, since hers was his anyway. Failing such a discovery he thrived on the energy of destruction and anarchy until the night of his confession to Polly, at which point he thrived on her. At least for a while the mad storm of his work calmed. The molten flow of the mountain receded into the earth and the fire of the volcano cooled to embers, around which the old man and the girl circled to stories of her mother, which often broke down early in the telling.

He would compose himself and begin again. Sometimes they talked so long into the night that history, for a night, passed unviolated, returned to the red mailbox intact and without changes, though in new contexts from changes that had come before. Etcher drank less. And then, from the choke in her voice at the mention of her father, he knew that sooner or later Polly would leave, that her fury at her father was the defiance of a heartbreak that sooner or later must reconcile itself to the source. And that was when he knew she’d go back to her father because she couldn’t leave as far behind as she might have hoped or believed the little girl who had run to her father on the station platform, who adored him more than anyone else in the world and always would. So once more Etcher began to drink. Once more he began to write. He was back in the heart’s doorway, passing through to seek its most malevolent possibility. If he could not, once more, find a resurrection, he would locate a trapdoor instead, a lever to pull through which Gann Hurley would plummet to oblivion. But though he might actually find such a trapdoor, though he might actually find such a lever, the fact was that this was his heart, not Polly’s, where her father was safe and untouchable, arrogantly secure, forever protected from even his daughter’s own rage.

In the back room he wrote faster and more furiously. At first he thought, on the night the knock came on the door, that it was the pounding in his own head; and when he realized it was not in his own head, when he realized it wasn’t Polly banging around in the other room or the dogs sniffing at the residue of wine in the empty bottles, he assumed any other possibility but the fantastic truth. He assumed it was the clerk from Central on his bicycle, though the clerk had never before passed the red mailbox. He assumed it was the cops. He assumed it was Hurley, who had come for his daughter. When Etcher called out the girl’s name and then called again, and went into the front room where Polly was frozen in the open doorway, he never assumed it would be Sally Hemings standing there on the porch outside, on the eve of a choice that would change everything, staring aghast into Polly’s face, which stared back. The mother, at fourteen, was several years younger than the daughter.

He nearly fainted.

Polly rushed as though to catch him but he caught himself, gazing from one girl to the other. Since the thing that terrified him most wasn’t simply her ghost but how in the doorway Sally looked at him as though she’d never seen him before, he said her name almost as a question. It didn’t entirely get past his lips, part of it caught in that doorway of the heart where it had lingered so long.

Sally turned from the door. She ran past the gray dogs curled on the porch, up the side of the crater toward the ridge of the mountaintop. She ran down the other side of the mountain toward the lava fields. She hadn’t a thought in her head of water or prison or slavery; later she would have liked to believe it was a dream, she’d have given anything to believe it was a dream. But at this moment she knew it wasn’t a dream and so she ran parched and exhausted and half out of her mind. She never looked back at the crater or the house or Polly standing in the doorway watching her go; when she finally reached the bottom of the volcano she went on running and stumbling across the black plain. Sometime in the night a wagon picked her up. Sometime in the night she felt and heard beneath her the turning of wheels; she felt and tasted on her lips the trickle of water. Into the night she didn’t dream or think at all. The wagon took her back to Paris.

In the early hours of morning she pulled herself off the back of the wagon. She wandered aimlessly as she’d done the night she buried the carving knife in what she believed was Thomas’ sleeping body back on the rue d’X. Pulled by the tides of the city, Sally returned to the center of the Parisian moment: the black prison with eight towers, which the revolution had stormed forty hours before. Smoke still hung on the square. Blood had long since overcome the scent of lilac from the broken window of the perfume shop. People streamed freely across the prison drawbridge in and out of the prison gate; high on the dark red pikes that surrounded the square were the heads of garrison soldiers. Women wept over the cobblestones where their men had died. Moving from widow to widow, talking to them, holding them in comfort, was Thomas.

Sally watched for some time. To each of the women Thomas gave some money. It reminded her of when she was a little girl and one day had seen him seize the whip from a man beating a slave. She sat dazed in the street amid the glass of the perfume-shop window; pieces of glass glittered in the dawn sun. Finally he saw her. In the smoke he stood staring at her. When he came toward her she couldn’t help but find his judgment terrifying. He looked at the glass all around her and said, “You’re going to cut yourself,” and picked her up and caught himself on a shard in the folds of the tattered dress he’d bought her; together they watched his hand bleed. As he carried her in his arms she tore from her dress a long strip and wrapped it around his hand. She wanted to sleep in his arms but said, “Put me down.”

He put her down. Her knees buckled beneath her and he had to catch her from falling in the street. She pulled herself from his arms and began walking away. “You’re too weak to walk,” he said.

“No.”

“You have nowhere to go.”

“Your hand’s bleeding,” she said; “you should go home.”

“If you leave now you’ll never see your family again. You’ll never see America again. You’ll be in a strange country forever, with strange people and a strange language you don’t know—”

“I’ll learn.”

“In Virginia you will be the mistress of my house. The queen of my bed.” He ran after her.

She turned to confront him. “I would just try to kill you again,” she said. “I’d keep trying until I did.”

“Where do you suppose you’ll go? How will you live?”

She resumed walking from the square down the winding street. This is the way to the river, she thought to herself. She heard him behind her.

“You belong to me,” she heard him say.

“Not anymore.”

“You belong to me,” he asserted, “I’ll take you back forcibly. I’ll put a price on your head and shackle you naked in the cabin of my ship like the property you are. Sally.”

“Goodbye.”

“Sally?”

She kept walking. The river is this way, she told herself. The smell of gunpowder wafted by.

“Sally,” he called from the top of the street. Above her she saw windows opening at the sound of his voice and people sticking their heads out to look. “Sally!” The violence of his voice was unbearable. In all her life she’d never heard him raise it. In confrontations with kings and revolutionists and priests and slaves alike, in his angriest, most determined and demanding moments, she had never heard his voice rise to a shout but rather fall to a whisper, except for that sound he made on the death of his wife, that wordless abysmal sound that sent Sally at the age of nine running from the deathbed. Down into the winding center of the city she made herself walk on, not daring to stop let alone look back at the figure of the tall man screaming her name at the top of the street littered with glass and blood.

He did not follow her, though she might have expected him to, or even hoped it. All that followed was her legend, which swept her along in its path through the riots and famine, massacres and purges, around fountains and under archways, beneath streetlights and over bridges and past cafés of swirling leaflets and ringing declarations: she moved through the Revolution like a shudder. She was the ultimate insurrectionist, who had liberated herself of the world’s greatest revolutionary, leaving him proclaiming his ownership and crying her name. Her eyes did not lose the druggy glow of her dreams. She did not take off the fine dress he once bought for her, now spattered with blood that many insistently mistook for the carnage of the Bastille even as it was in fact from Thomas’ own hand. Her legend swept her from the flat-topped smoking mountain of her vision, where she saw the daughter she never had, to the Mountain of the convention hall, where the new Republic’s leaders sat against one wall overlooking the wreckage of their wrath, Sally on the top tier in a gown of blood that became brown with years, the black muse of a new calendar with a choice she never made lying in rubble at her feet, the throne of a Queen of Slaves rejected for a revolution’s realm.

On the top tier of the Mountain, the squalling deputies of the convention below them debating the law of a new era and whether under that law blood flowed uphill, Maximilien sat on one side of Sally and on the other Georges, whom Sally called Jack. They were hyena and lion respectively. In the mornings she stared at Maximilien across his sitting chamber, waiting for whatever inspiration would unlock him from his impotence; because Maximilien meant to be a god the prospect of an erection only terrified him, every failure only convincing him anew of how godlike he was. Because Jack had no interest in being a god he slipped Sally from Maximilien’s bedroom in the dead of night and fucked her heartily, returning her to his rival’s chaste contemplation by sunup. I’ve exchanged a complete American revolutionary for a couple of half-finished French ones, Sally laughed to herself one rainy afternoon, wondering if the two added up to something more or less than the one. She was watching, for what must have been the thousandth time, the earthbound glide of the guillotine in the place de la Concorde. In the gray wet sky the blade gleamed like a dead star doomed to fall from space again and again. When her ecstasy reached the point of delirium, when in her mind she had brought the knife down into Thomas’ body so many times she just couldn’t do anything more to free herself of him, Sally returned from the guillotine one twilight to stand in Maximilien’s atrium, her dress soaked with more blood than could ever dry to brown in a lifetime. Blood was on her hands, blood was smeared across her face. Maximilien appeared in the archway and looked at her. “What kind of monster have I become?” she asked him.

“You’ve become,” was his cool answer, “the symbol of the Revolution’s glory, its purity of purpose and pitiless justice.”

“It’s enough blood, Maxime. It’s been more than enough.”

“There’s yet another head to drop,” he advised. “So take your animal pleasure from him tonight while he’s still around to give it.”

It took every argument and entreaty, every tactic and ruse for Sally to persuade Jack to flee France that night and save his own life. Finally it took her promise to go with him, since he insisted he would not go without her. They lived together in London not far from the house of the American couple where Sally had stayed her first night after crossing the Atlantic five years before. What was left of the Eighteenth Century passed in Sally’s whispered counsel and Georges’ underground manifestos smuggled to France, where with his departure the Revolution had been deprived of its last chance to consume itself. With the collapse of the Bonaparte Putsch of ’98 and the beheading of its leader, and the Revolution’s uninterrupted metamorphosis into totalitarian state, Jack lost heart, trying to pinpoint where everything had gone wrong, when the Revolution had first foreshadowed the terrorist tenet of the modern age, which holds that freedom is not the ideal of the slave but the luxury of the bourgeois, that one is not a victim in spite of his innocence but because of it, because the terrorist holds innocence to be the guiltiest and most contemptible of political infractions.

Mostly, in the tradition of all egoists, Jack mourned his own irrelevance. Sally could not mistake his resentment toward her for it, how he held her accountable; in retrospect he would rather have given up his neck than his place in history, though he could bear to give up neither if it meant relinquishing his claims on her body. “My God,” he sputtered one night in an exceptionally lucid moment, “does all of history think with its dick?” His happiest moment may well have been his last, on the eve of the Nineteenth Century, when he discovered that history remembered him after all. A stranger entered a tavern where he found Jack having supper. Throwing wide his arms the stranger exclaimed, in French, “Can this honor actually be mine? Is it really the great Danton I see before me?” and before Sally could take the ale from her mouth to warn him, Jack, literally flattered to death, expansively allowed as how he indeed was that person. The stranger smiled, pulled a pistol from under his cloak and blew Jack halfway across the room. Three other diners rose from their tables to reveal themselves as revolutionary grenadiers. “By the judgment of the Committee on Public Safety,” the stranger pronounced to Jack’s dead body, and then turned to the shocked twenty-five-year-old Sally: “Citizen Robespierre sends for you, madame.” Six hours later she was crossing the Channel back to France.

As it happened, her reunion with Maximilien was limited to his image on the edifices and banners and statues of Paris, where he had become deity of the Revolution’s secular religion. Sally and her guards arrived at the Luxembourg Palace just in time to hear the news that, at the moment the assassin’s bullet shattered Jack’s chest, Maximilien had clutched his own heart with a cry and tumbled from his seat at the very summit of the Mountain. Only the rush of several flacks to the podium of the convention hall broke the fall, prolonging life one more day until its final agonizing rupture. In her carriage the soldier who had shot Jack took the news with relative calm. “Robespierre is dead. Citizen Saint-Just is Dictator now,” he announced. “May I drop you elsewhere, madame?” and Sally allowed as how she’d just as soon be taken across the river to the Hotel Langeac. By the time her carriage reached the rue d’X her legend had transformed yet again, from the woman who had declined a queendom of slaves and a place as mistress of the Revolution to become instead a subversive’s whore. Perpetuating this legend was not the folly of her choice but the sanguine conviction of it. In the Hotel Langeac she had a room with a fireplace and a four-poster bed, and a window that pointed the other direction from where Thomas’ balcony had looked the night he watched her run from the hotel for the last time as his slave. At night she could see from her window the streetlights of the boulevards in the distance and the carriages that brought the men to her. They left her gifts, small porcelain figures and little snowstorms imprisoned in crystal balls which adorned the shelf of her room.

During the day she made jewelry, necklaces and earrings, and recalled her greatest creation. I invented a country, she had heard Thomas say, with the arrogance of a man who thinks it’s the business of men to make countries and the business of women to make jewelry. But it had taken her all her life to realize it was she who made the country and that the country had always been hers to make, that it waited for either her yes or no that afternoon in the place de la Bastille so as to be born one thing or the other, as an embryo waits for one chromosome or another to be born man or woman. It had taken all her life to hope that in saying no, thus denying herself the chance ever to see her country again, she had made it a purer thing. But she wasn’t so sure about purity anymore, having survived a revolution so obsessed with purity of conscience that its heart had gone first to stone, then to dust, before scattering to nothing.

She couldn’t be so sure about America either. A visiting mystic brought her news in the first year of the Nineteenth Century about the slave wars and the mad philosopher general who led them after he’d sold himself to his own slaves in bondage. “No more,” Sally said, “I don’t want to hear any more.” But when her visitor was leaving and she extracted from him the obligatory gift, she begged that it be something of America; and though there was no real way for her to be certain that the deck of cards he produced was an American Tarot, as he insisted, she took his word for it, convinced of the momentousness of the sacrifice when the owner gave up a single card, without which none of the deck’s other seventy-seven had meaning. Tacking the Queen of Wands to her bedchamber wall, she looked at it the last thing on going to sleep at night and the first thing on waking in the morning and, lost in its message in between, every night and every morning for the next thirty-four years until the day she died in the Hotel Langeac on the rue d’X at the age of sixty-two. The year was 1835, or year XLIII of what was once called the Revolution but which Maximilien had renamed before his death, with the obvious self-referential implications, the Deliverance.

In 1790 her legend swept Thomas home. Halfway across the sea the ship’s crew became alarmed to find Thomas missing from his cabin and nowhere on deck. He was finally located in the ship’s hull, looking for the deepest and coolest place to soothe the blinding pain in his head. When he wouldn’t leave the hull, living there like a rat all the way back to America, James Hemings took over Thomas’ cabin, sleeping in Thomas’ bed and eating Thomas’ meals, reading Thomas’ books and drinking Thomas’ wine, making the arrangements for the rest of the voyage. At the harbor in Norfolk the ship was met by a carriage with black window shades, behind which a semiconscious Thomas hid from sunlight and America in equal measure.

When he reached home and his slaves turned out to welcome the carriage’s return, their enthusiasm dissolved into confusion as minutes passed into hours with no one emerging while the carriage sat in front of the house. Again and again James would open the carriage door and peer in, the slaves watching as whispers passed back and forth between driver and unseen passenger, each exchange concluding with James shutting the door and the master declining to appear. Occasionally the slaves would lend the situation an increasingly tepid cheer as though to encourage Thomas out of the carriage; but finally the crowd simply dispersed, returning to their labors, the carriage left alone in the yard. Darkness fell. James unhitched the horses. He spent the rest of the evening with his mother, to whom he broke the news that she would never see her daughter again. Whether it was her wails of despair or simply the cold dead of night that inspired Thomas to make an escape, in the morning the slaves found the carriage open and empty, and word spread over the plantation that the master was finally in the house.

The country was riveted by the news of Thomas’ return. Its elite flocked to his porch only to find themselves rudely rebuffed by James, who announced to all that the master would be receiving no one. The plea of the country’s government that Thomas accept a seat of power went unanswered except for the laughter heard coming from the house’s darkest quarters. James ran the affairs of the plantation as he had managed the business of the oversea voyage. Several years passed. One summer day an erstwhile visitor to the plantation, undeterred by the rumors of the Monticello Madness, rode up within sight of the house on a far hill and found his way blocked by a particularly grisly wall of wood and wire and thistle. It was the sort of fence constructed not as demarcation but barricade. Much more astonishing, the wall was guarded by armed slaves. “See here, boy,” the visitor ordered one, “let me pass that I may have an audience with Mr. Jefferson.” The slave cocked his musket with an aim as true as the light in his eyes. “Beyond this point is Free Virginia, your fucking majesty,” the black guard answered. “Go let your horse shit somewhere else.”

Free Virginia? the man thought in horror riding away. By nightfall Richmond had heard and by dawn the rest of the nation. By week’s close the realization that Thomas’ plantation had been transformed into an armed compound was supplemented by bulletins of arriving black guerrillas from Haiti and Santo Domingo slipping through the South Carolina coast. By the end of the month the world knew that a slave army of hundreds, perhaps thousands, led by their silent pale general, was camped in the heart of America. By the last days of summer the terrified white citizenry was mobilizing in haste as the country’s new president went to Virginia to talk to an old friend.

The president arrived at dusk in a carriage of his own, protected by superfluous guards who could be made short work of by the black troops that spread over the hills beyond the barricades. Watching from his carriage window the president saw bonfires on the knolls, cotton fields completely uprooted and cleared away for training grounds, free blacks and former slaves with guns and what had once been the plantation slave quarters converted to barracks, food bins and munitions sheds. A white flag flew from the president’s carriage top. Another white flag was draped across his chest, though whether it provided a better target than sanctuary became a joke that traveled so quickly among the slavesoldiers that James Hemings had already heard it by the time the president reached the door of the house.

The house was utterly dilapidated. Doors hung on their hinges and shutters from the windows. Vines from the growth outside slid through the guest chambers like snakes. The ballroom had been gutted to become a strategy room, with a huge topography of the countryside laid out on a table and a flurry of markers depicting lines of attack so ominous the president averted his eyes, afraid he’d see something that jeopardized his life. “Doesn’t matter, Mr. President,” James assured him, “nothing there your white ass would understand anyway.” James led the president deeper into the house until they came to a back room where two armed sentries stepped aside to let them pass.

The dead smell of the room was overpowering. The president stood in the dark long enough to believe his eyes would never adjust to it. A dim form finally began to appear on the other side of the room. “Could you please light a candle?” came a familiar whisper to the form of a second guard, who lit a candle to reveal the form of yet a third guard. The white flag on the president’s chest soaked up the candlelight like a sponge, glowing back. “Hello, John,” the man seated on the other side of the room whispered.

The president stepped forward. “My God, Thomas,” he answered.

“How’s the country these days?” Thomas didn’t look directly at the president but shielded his eyes from the dull throb of the pinpoint of candlelight.

“The headaches,” John surmised, remembering.

“It’s not even a headache anymore, John. There are rare moments when the pain actually goes away, I mean moments, ten or fifteen seconds, and you know what I think when that happens? For those ten or fifteen seconds I’m afraid I’ve died, because it’s the only thing I can imagine taking away the pain. It’s become the kind of pain that reminds me I’m alive.”

“The country is damned terrified, to answer your question. Are you planning to take over with your slaves? You never fooled me about your appetite for power, Thomas. The others, Abigail, well, she’s always been irrationally fond of you, with a preternatural faith in that part of you that was always so good at being all things to all men. But you resent it that I’m president, I know that. It’s been like this between us ever since we’ve been friends. You resent it deeply.” He whined, “I deserve to be president.” He stepped closer. “What the hell has happened to you?”

The tawny circle of the candlelight widened now to reach Thomas’ brow, and it was with a shock that John then saw the other man was naked.

“Thomas,” he croaked, his throat becoming thick, to which Thomas raised his hand to his eyes once more and John heard the clanking of the chains and saw the shackles on his wrists. “Oh no,” he said. He looked at the two armed guards standing to each side of the naked white man. “Oh no, Thomas.” He looked around him for James Hemings, unsure whether he was still in the dark of the room by the door. Vehemently he cried at the two guards, “This is an abomination. This is an outrage.” He lunged at Thomas as though to rip him free of the chains, but Thomas raised his hand just a half a second behind the guards raising their guns; whether Thomas was signaling John to stop in his tracks or the guards to refrain from shooting John wasn’t clear, perhaps even to Thomas.

“Please, John. My head hurts badly enough. No one has taken me prisoner. I sold myself.”

“What?” said the president.

“It was all above board. As legal as a transaction can be.” He turned to one of the guards. “Is there any wine?” he said. “Would you like some wine, John?” The guards didn’t move or answer. “I can’t take this light anymore, please snuff the candle.” The guard on Thomas’ left leaned forward and, with a quick puff, blew the room back into darkness. Instinctively the other white man recoiled. “It’s the final resolution of the dilemma of power,” he heard Thomas say in the dark, “to be at once both king and slave. To at once lead an army and be its waterboy. To command every man and woman within miles, and be subject to the whim of any little colored child who wanders in and orders me to dance like a puppet, or make a funny face, or wear something silly on my head such as the peel of an orange or an animal turd. Sometimes I just wish for a woman, is all. Sometimes I wish for just one, who in turn may ride me chained through the hallways of the house like a beast of burden. I wish there was just one woman who could come into the dark and arouse me, and drain the pain from my head to my loins through her lips. But there’s no woman who can do that anymore, try though I might, beautiful though one might be.”

“You’re mad,” John’s voice cracked.

“You haven’t even asked what my price was,” Thomas sulked. “Ask me what my price was.”

“You’re insane.”

“The first price was too high, of course. The first price was too impossible. It was her, naturally: she was the price. When they refused that, I would have settled for a single night with her, and when they refused that I would have settled for an hour. But she simply wasn’t part of the bargain, was she? They couldn’t have sold her to me even if they wanted because, you know, it’s a funny thing, but she had entirely other ideas about it. So finally I settled on a bottle of wine. It was a good bottle of wine. You should make that clear to others when you go back, it was a good bottle of wine. You should make sure they understand it was a bottle of French vintage that James brought back from Paris. I drank it in an hour. While I drank,” he said, “I saw her face and touched her hand, and it was hours before she left me again, before the edges of her began to dissipate in the dark until she was just a small black pool on the floor next to my bed.”

“It was that girl in London,” John said.

There was a pause that seemed momentous to John only because it was so dark, and then he heard Thomas say, “I can’t see your white flag anymore, John.”

“It was that girl in London, who brought over your daughter. And Abigail said, She shouldn’t go to Paris; and I was a fool, not because I didn’t believe her but because I knew she was right and I wouldn’t admit it. She shouldn’t go to Paris, Abigail said. If you had come to get your daughter in London as had been planned, everything would have been different. You would have gotten your daughter in London as planned and taken her back to Paris with you, and that girl would have been on the first ship back to America.”

“I can’t see your white flag anymore so I think you better go. If you stay longer, no one will be able to see your white flag. Nothing stays white here very long.”

John turned, stumbling in the dark toward the door. He grappled for it so frantically that the white flag ripped from his chest. He ran from the room clutching it in his hand; he ran down the hall of the house past the armed slaves and through the house’s entryway. He virtually leapt into the waiting carriage, jarring it so hard the horses took the impact as a signal to lurch down the road in full gallop. Half of Virginia was behind them before they stopped.

Thomas’ army moved that night. Thomas rode with James in his black carriage, chains around his wrists and clothed in an Indian blanket; the president’s militia reached the plantation in time to find squealing pigs and lingering mules as its new custodians. The slave army alternately lumbered and darted across the American countryside, disbanding in one hamlet to reassemble in another valley, engulfed by skirmishes from Virginia to Ohio to Pennsylvania and New York, back down to Maryland through the fall and into winter; never quite deciding whether to try to seize the country or leave it. Every once in a while Thomas would emerge after sundown from his carriage or tent. He would walk through the camp, directing his army’s maneuvers on their march west to the Louisiana territories while the autumn wind blew his tall frail body and tattered rags and his masters ordered him to feed the horses and clean the rifles. When the campaign’s climactic battle decimated the forces so disastrously even retreat wasn’t feasible, when America washed itself in a tide of slave blood, James chained Thomas to the carriage seat and they made their escape into a country that had no name but west. Eventually they came to an Indian village.

The village stood high on a mesa that overlooked the world for as far as Thomas could see. Abandoning the carriage James unlocked Thomas’ chains and the two men made their way by foot up the path alongside the mesa, where they were greeted by the natives, into whose arms Thomas collapsed. Two Indians carried him across a narrow stone bridge that connected the main mesa to a smaller one, so high above the ground that Thomas was overcome with the fatalistic calm of having placed his life utterly in the hands of others. He was taken into an empty adobe house, where he was set on blankets with a bowl of water beside him. When he lay down, his head hurt even more; and so for some time after the natives left he sat upright, soothing the pounding at the back of his skull against the coolness of the dirt wall. He was thirsty for some wine. He kept thinking he should drink the water in the bowl but he hadn’t the energy to lift it to his mouth, and a few moments later he regretted not having taken the opportunity when he woke in the hotel room to find the water gone, displaced by the long-forgotten scent of someone sleeping in the bed several feet away, the strange bald boy with the pictures on his body coming through the door.